Books to be burnt at University of Copenhagen

14/04-11 kl. 08:10 Education

Photo: Photos.com Shelf after shelf of humanities classics are to go up in smoke

Hundreds of thousands of books are to be burnt when the Faculty of Humanities merges its libaries into a new knowledge centre in 2013

by Mike Young

It brings on grim associations of 1930's Germany and the sci-fi movie Fahrenheit 451.

But hundreds of thousands of books at the Faculty of Humanities (KUA) are to be put into the incinerator in connection with the set-up of a new knowledge centre in 2013. This is according to the Danish national radio station P4.

There will be not enough shelf space in the new building, so four department libraries will be forced to get rid of one third of their books. Just one of them, the Saxo-Institute, home of the subjects of history and ethnology, has to get rid of a total of 70,000 books.

Doesn't like it

Staff representative at the Faculty of Humanities Christian Troelsgård doesn't like it at all.

»When you reduce the book collections in this way, the University of Copenhagen reduces our ability to carry out what we have been hired to do,« he says, adding that the incineration undermines the foundations of research.

»We don't like book burnings«, he adds.

It was either books or students

Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Kirsten Refsing, does not see the book burning as a problem.

»It is OK, because there is no other way to do it. One of our proposals was to offer the books to the students. But this is a problem as the books have been acquired by taxpayers' funding. As an institution, we just can't sell them,« she says.

Lack of space, has the Faculty facing a choice, says Dean Kirsten Refsing:

»We were allowed to build the house, and we were given the choice of filling it with books or students, and we have chosen to fill it with students«.

miy@adm.ku.dk

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What do you think of the book burn plan?

1 comment

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16/04-11 kl. 09:38 John Mallett:

Madness with books

In my opinion, to burn the books is simply unethical. It would be to increase pollution and atmospheric carbon at the expense of the taxpayer, if nothing else.
So a controlled sale/gift would be better. First an offer to other libraries around the world. Then a public offering as some form of sale. There must be a list of these books - the libray cannot possibly not have that! So this cannot be that hard to do. Payment need be no more than to cover the costs of this process, but books could be auctioned, generating funds for the students building, the library, or anything else that the taxpayer might be funding in the University (or elsewhere if the University is so well off).
If no library and no member of the public wants to buy some of these books then, and only then (by say November at the earliest) perhaps these could be burnt in place of fuel. The fuel cost savings should be publicly audited and made openly available! Clearly accounted against the purchase price of the books, please!
I would hope that failure to do something like this would meet with some form of legal prosecution.

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